Hana Khan Carries On

Then you tell me your favourite colour so I can send you flowers, your favourite place so I can take you there, your favourite book so I can read it just so we can argue about it. I know you want to work in radio, and I plan to cheer you on every step of the way. I might even listen to TSwift, if you insist.

My father says that trying to stop hate is like trying to stop the tides,” Rashid said. “The best thing you can do is take advantage of it. Don’t stop the tide from flowing. Build a hydroelectric dam and make electricity instead, enough to power ten thousand houses. That’s how you stop hate.

What do we owe the people who grew us up, who first made up our entire world? It's complicated for the kids of immigrants. I'm not talking about the usual "my parents don't understand" thing. My parents believe in the power of choice, and they never asked me to sacrifice my dreams for theirs. Yet I feel like I should anyway. Where does this feeling come from? Is it just loyalty and strong family ties? Is it because, as part of a marginalized community, we all had to stick together to survive, and that sort of experience tends to become habit? Maybe it's about guilt. We are kids who benefited from the sacrifices our parents made when they decided to move to a richer, safer country. If we then grow up to grow apart, have we become ungrateful villains?

I do know that, for all the benefits of being the daughter of immigrants, the one drawback is I’ve had to establish my own sense of place. All my extended family live elsewhere, on a different continent, and we don’t visit often enough to form real ties. There’s a lot of freedom in being a pioneer of your family’s history in a new place, of course. But there’s a lot of loneliness too. I’ve had to find my own family, to make the sort of friendships that are family. Yet lack of history means my roots here are shallow, my stories only a few years old.

Everything is better told as a story, and mine is still unfolding.

Tell me, Hana, how strong can blood ties remain when they stretch across an ocean?

The first law of thermodynamics states that energy is neither created nor destroyed, but it can be transformed from one form to another. That law will get you every time, so make sure the energy you put out into the world is positive. Otherwise it will turn the other way and then turn on you.

I had filled my heart and hands with everyone else’s burdens, had accepted their worries as if they had been my own, assuming they were all doing the same for me—but they weren’t.

Aydin threw back his head and laughed out loud. My heart lifted. I wanted to hold on to that joyful laughter. I wanted to bottle the sound and play it back on demand. I wanted to listen to him laugh for the rest of my life

Books are like people, you have to give them room to breathe.

Our secrets exposed what we most deeply fear, or most fervently want

It is hard to lie in letters -- too easy for teardrops to mark the page

I like to think of our tiny speck-of-dust Earth wrapped inside its snug little Kuiper belt, cocooned somewhere inside the massive Oort cloud, completely undetectable inside a universe so massive there is no comparison. And here we are, living and dying, completely unaware of all that lies beyond. Terrifying, but also comforting, especially when things happen that are hard to understand.

But I am made up of more than my roots; I have grown aboveground as well. My branches reach out in different directions. My limbs have faced wind and snow and ice and rain. Leaves open to the sun and close in the dark. I guess what I'm saying is, I'm grateful for every new root I have discovered lately, and for every new bud that sprouts, despite everything.

Muslims believe that when you make du’a, or sincere prayer, for something, one of three things happens: (1) you are granted your request, (2) something bad that was headed your way is deflected, or (3) the good thing you asked for is kept for you in heaven.

I recently told my mom about a hateful thing that had happened to me. Her response was to casually share a story I had never heard before. When she was new to the country, she was rammed by an irate fellow shopper in a grocery store, a random, race-motivated attack. Translation: What I had faced was nothing in comparison to how things used to be. According to my folks, I should get over it, because in the grand scheme of things, I am winning. But am I? Compared to what she had to face on the regular, yes. Compared to what I dream for myself, no. It is this personal accounting that gets me every time, listener friends. And here’s the truth of it all: Things are better for folks like me—the racialized, the marginalized, the Other. But because two truths can exist simultaneously in the universe, things are worse for us too. Real change is a boulder we keep pushing, but don’t fool yourself into thinking it doesn’t push back. Because it does. And sometimes it pushes back hard. In my parents’ time, simply being acknowledged as worthy of notice, as having your own history and worth, was enough. That’s not enough for me. I want to be included and celebrated. I want nuanced and plentiful stories to be told about my people, and I don’t want it to mean something when one of us breaks through, because there are so many of us breaking through, all the time, in every field.

For as long as we both shall live, my answer to that question will always be . . . yes.

Carry with difficulty,” Mom said out loud, interrupting my train of thought. “What?” I said, distracted. “Six letters,” she said. “Carry with difficulty.” “Schlep,” I said.

If soccer couldn't accept all of me, I wouldn't let it have any of me

It was as if the spices had sunk into her skin. The fragrance of those spices had always been synonymous with Mom and home.

Maybe growing apart was part of growing up

I hope you tune in again soon for all the adventures that await.

I could believe that Junaid Uncle saw his son as an investment, to be held on to until a suitable return was achieved.